Ask HN: 57 sales totaling $1,539 for micro-SaaS? Is the idea dead?
Hi friends, I'm making a small web service based on GPT4 for non-English speaking audience. It creates marketing strategy for marketers and business owners.
4 years behind, 9 ideas with 0$ mrr, thousands of hours on my ass, living on credit, dreaming and here I have my first 57 sales (one-time payments) for 1539$ in just 2 months. I was happy, but not for long.
I learned an interesting detail, making the first sales doesn't mean that the idea will eventually survive and work in the long run. It just shows that the idea is proven.
All my sales came from non-scalable channels (telegram chat with marketing strategists). I started looking for the same segment online:
- Buying promotional posts on telegram. - Wrote articles on local startup sites. - Did search advertising in yandex.direct, google ads - I did sms mailing.
Nothing. Not a single sale. Absolutely the same offer.
I have a question. Could it be that it was just a mirage? These sales confused me and gave me faith in an idea that is dead? Or should I dig further, test hypotheses, spend time looking for a segment?
Friends, please share your experiences. Thanks in advance.
Published in 2024, this chronicle by @ilyaovchinnikov details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $1,539.
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
Based on your data your ideas have 1/10 odds of $1539 revenue and each idea takes on average 5.3 months to execute.
You can:
- Spend the next 5.3 months on a new idea. The expected value of this is $153.9 in 5.3 months.
- Spend the next 5.3 months doing your existing telegram strategy. The expected value of this is $4078.35 in 5.3 months.
This assumes your existing telegram strategy is reproducible. If it is - then double, triple, quadruple down on that. It's working, get after it. New channels are like new ideas, you may need to try 9 of them before you find one that also works.
If your existing strategy is not reproducible (I.e., in addition to the new channels not working your existing channel is also drying up) then I'd take a hard look at why.
And since this is HN: https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
One of the hardest pills to swallow when you are doing a startup is that there are customers you don't want. A customer that takes a week of grinding to close and makes you $27 IS NOT A CUSTOMER YOU WANT. You should pretend that sale never happened. It is just as much validation of your idea as a car salesman who manages to sell a brand new car to someone for 10% of what it is worth.
My honest advice is to get a job and stop digging yourself into a financial hole by living off credit. Work on your project one day a week. Try to take what you have and pivot it to a problem more people have and you can solve. Your goal should be to make something that you can spend 1/3 of the selling price on ads to acquire a customer. If you can't sell it with ads and you need a human involved to close people, you need to be selling your product for however much it would cost to cover a full time sales person (not you).
My understanding is that the whole point of SaaS (software as a service) is that users pay you an ongoing fee for use of your software (i.e. a subscription). What you're doing is selling a product and will probably need a much more significant ongoing sales effort whereas with SaaS, past a certain point, you only need to sign up enough new subscribers to cover your churn. You mention 9 prior ideas with $0 MRR - this idea also has $0 MRR (monthly recurring revenue) as one time payments are not recurring. You need to decide what you want - to build a product you sell for a one-time fee, or to create a subscription based product.
I think your product is validated. The fact you weren't able to make any other sales might be a red flag, or simply a numerical issue. Are you sure you were reaching out to the right people via the other channels? Were those people ready to buy your service, right then?
You have a niche of marketing strategists, who are willing to pay for your service. Marketing is harder than one can think, even when you think you found the right user persona.
Keep leveraging the telegram chat and maybe look at high-quality search intent (SEO traffic from Google), it takes time but it rewards in the long term.
How many of those 57 who purchased it, are actually using it?
The fact is that most (all?) of the sales come from the same channel/community and that the price is low enough ($27 on average) might indicate that people are simply wanted to support you, or they liked you or your content, not your product. That's the problem with builing in public trend.
You need to reach out to those who purchased, and try to do user interviews with them. Learn how to do user research, i.e. prepare questions, interview script, record them, etc.